Evidence that we're in the Matrix

I think we're all familiar with the phenomenon that the age of computers has ushered in a new set of "round" numbers: 256, 64, 1028, etc. And we're used to seeing these power-of-two numbers crop up in all sorts of places: in processor speeds, in text field character limits, and what have you.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that the standard size of a pack of Kraft Singles American Cheese is 64 slices. I mean: why 64? It just doesn't make any sense. Unless, of course, we are living in one gigantic computer program. In that case, there being 64 slices of cheese in a pack would be no more strange than, say, being able to carry a maximum of 255 rupees.

And while we're at it, why not an ad hoc appreciation for Bill Withers?

He had a voice like an angel

Shaq to Cleveland

But will it make a difference? Shaq's 37. His exercise regimen consists of incoherent Twittering. He's going to be slow and injury prone. I dunno.

While it's true he averaged like 18-8 or something last season (which is pretty frackin good for someone his age), it's definitely not going to be better than that this year.

I'm not convinced that this is a game changer. LeBron is pretty crazy, sure--definitely the craziest since Jordon. But Jordon had a Hall of Famer--in his prime--at this side. At his age, I don't think that Shaq will provide the killer second option in the same way that Pippen provided it for Jordon, or Gasol for Kobe. I don't see Cleveland getting out of the East.

Barring some crazy acquisition by Cleveland, my prediction for next year: Cleveland loses in the conference finals, and LeBron heads to New York in the summer.

AYSO traditions die hard

Reading about the US upset over Spain, I ran into this snippet:

Midfielder Michael Bradley, son of the U.S. coach, will miss the final. He received a red card for a late challenge in the 87th minute, the third American ejection of the tournament.

Ha! So the coach's son is on the team, just like how it was back in AYSO soccer down at Winnetka Park.

I wonder if the US team receives oranges during halftime.

Why Twitter is so unreliable

Much ink has been spilled over the unreliably of the torrent of Tweets coming out of Iran, but I just want to point out that, specifically, what keeps Twitter from being a good source of information is that sources cannot be independently confirmed. Which is to say, normally, if multiple, separate sources tell you the same story, you can be pretty sure that what they're saying is true--their stories are mutually corroborating.

Of course, this doesn't work if the sources had an opportunity to collude before you could question them, for the obvious reason that they could have agreed on a lie.

Because Twitter allows everyone to see what everyone else is saying, it allows all sources the opportunity to "collude"--there are many voices, but none of them have the power to corroborate what any of the other voices are saying.

So the irony here is that the very ease of information sharing is what is preventing us from getting reliable information. I wonder if there's some clever way you could get around this? One thing that comes to mind is that videos and photos can corroborate each other via their metadata: if two different videos depict the same event, and they both purport to have been taken at the same time and place, then that is good evidence that the metadata is accurate, simply because it is unlikely that a person has the wherewithal to alter the metadata on his video to be similar to one that is already posted on the internet somewhere--it would be a difficult thing to "collude" on.

The drawback here, though, is that videos and photos are not tagged with metadata in a standard way (I don't think), so we aren't able to do this analysis (it's not like the date and location of the video/photo is contained in the file header (again: I don't think)). But I think you could really get somewhere if the metadata were in place.

(Photo by carrotcreative)

Borrowing money from yourself at Carl's Jr.

Ezra Klein says an interesting thing:

This gets to an important point about cheap food: It's not necessarily cheap. It's cheap now. But given the health costs associated with obesity and diabetes -- and given their stunning prevalence in low-income communities -- it's really a way of borrowing money from your future self. No one thinks about it that way, but for this family that bought fast food because it was affordable and now spends thousands of dollars out-of-pocket on diabetes medication, that's been the overall impact.

I think there's something deeply screwed up about a country that not only doesn't make any effort to make healthy food affordable, but actively subsidizes unhealthy food as well. And, as Klein points out, in the long run these twisted incentives end up costing us more.

(Photo by ebruli)

Cohen's adventures in Iran

Unlike most pundits, the NYT's Roger Cohen is actually in Iran, getting into adventures. Well worth a read.

"Clone cloud"

Via a dude at my work, a pretty neat article about how Intel is taking cloud computing to another level--by running a clone of your mobile device in the cloud:

When you ask your handheld to perform a computational task that would benefit from more horsepower, the device and the cloud could negotiate at run-time to determine how best to satisfy your request. If the cloud can help, it will - delivering the results back to your handheld.

Of course, offloading computationally expensive operations from clients to hosts is not new. The Clone Cloud is different, however, in that the client/host relationship dissolves into the cloud. The smartphone isn't getting data from an application running in the cloud. The smartphone itself is running in the cloud in clone form.

The cloud, by the way, doesn't have to live on big iron in a data center. The Clone Cloud concept is designed to scale down to a point where the host could be your laptop or desktop machine.

To demonstrate the power of the Clone Cloud, Chun ran an image-processing task that took a minute and a half on a smartphone. On the smartphone's clone, the same task took a second and a half - including the transmission time - and the process was seamless. To the user, it simply looked like one hella-fast smartphone.

A couple of things. First, I think the idea of the "cloud" consisting of just your own hardware--your desktop, for instance--is pretty dang neat. I like the idea that consumers will just buy computing power in the abstract--in the form of a desktop, say--and that everything else we have will draw from this pool of computing power.

Second, I was surprised to see "hella" in the article (the author hails from SF), especially since this is an article written for the UK Register. Are people over there savvy enough to recognize the term? It seems like even a lot of people in Southern California don't know it.

(Photo by MikeLove)

Some fucking bullshit

Dan Froomkin, who wrote good--and by "good" I mean very, very critical--posts about the White House--up to and including Obama's--has been fired by the Washington Post.

Here's hoping he gets swiftly picked up by another paper, and keeps those posts coming.

Tales of Energy Efficiency

Pretty neat:

Nokia, however, has taken another baby step in that direction with the invention of a cell phone that recharges itself using a unique system: It harvests ambient radio waves from the air, and turns that energy into usable power. Enough, at least, to keep a cell phone from running out of juice.

...

Mind you, harvesting ambient electromagnetic energy is never going to offer enough electricity to power your whole house or office, but it just might be enough to keep a cell phone alive and kicking. Currently Nokia is able to harvest all of 5 milliwatts from the air; the goal is to increase that to 20 milliwatts in the short term and 50 milliwatts down the line. That wouldn't be enough to keep the phone alive during an active call, but would be enough to slowly recharge the cell phone battery while it's in standby mode, theoretically offering infinite power -- provided you're not stuck deep underground where radio waves can't penetrate.

Nokia says it hopes to commercialize the technology in three to five years.

(Photo by MRBECK)

If Iraqis could Tweet, would we be so cavalier about bombing them? We might, if they Tweeted all the time, for no good reason.

Although I disagree with some of the phrasing that he uses--clearly, even those who favor bombing Iran do not do so because they "want to slaughter" innocents, as he seems to imply at one point--I think Glenn Greenwald makes a very, very good observation:

Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is. Advocating a so-called "attack on Iran" or "bombing Iran" in fact means slaughtering huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran inspiring so many -- obliterating their homes and workplaces, destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their society and their lives. The same is true every time we start mulling the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it's some abstract decision in a video game.

Humanizing is right. Although it's a bit of a cliche at this point to refer people to the #iranelection tag on Twitter, I think it actually shows pretty well how these social networking sites enable Americans to become exposed to--and emotionally invested in--whole groups of people who would otherwise remain foreign and abstract.

It makes me wonder, a bit, how things would have been different if Iraqis had been able to communicate this effectively in the run-up to the war in 2003. Suppose that when their homes and neighborhoods were bombed, they emitted a steady stream of horrifying pictures and videos? Suppose that they directly entreated us to stop raining death down upon them from above with Facebook groups and hashtags? Even as I write that it seems kind of dumb, but, still: isn't there something very powerful about one person saying to another, in whatever medium: please don't kill me and my family?

The post title is a paraphrase of a great Jack Handy line, that questions whether we would be so quick to cut down trees, if they could scream. Unfortuneately, I have a feeling that the same principle applies to people. Before the internets, it would have been nearly impossible to have any kind of meaningful, personal, and affecting interaction with someone on the other side of the world--and, as a consequence, the snuffing out of tens, even hundreds of thousands of lives would enter into our brains as bare factual information. Psychologically, we wouldn't "hear the screams".

So maybe this is the "Kantian turn" in the ongoing discussion about what, if anything, the role of sites like Twitter are playing in the Iranian civil unrest. The change isn't taking place within Iran; it's taking place within our brains.

(Photo by natachaqs)

But--that's all you do all day. It's your job

During the Magic-Lakers series, one of the storylines was how Dwight Howard doesn't have any moves. I mean, he's supposed to be this dominant low post player, the next Shaq, and the guy can't score because all he can do is 1) dunk and 2) these unconvincing running hook things. And so I remember saying to Harinder, this is crazy. Dwight Howard is a professional basketball player. I go to work for like eight hours a day testing software; this guy spends eight hours a day practicing basketball. How is it that he hasn't perfected--and I mean fucking perfected--at least 14 different post moves--with both hands? What is this guy doing all day? I mean, literally, I think I have more low post moves than Dwight Howard. I'm not even joking.

Anyway, the same sort of thing came up tonight, as I listened (yes, listened--mlb.tv was blacked out because I'm in the A's market, and my cable doesn't get hooked up till later this week) to the Dodger game. In the 10th inning James Loney tried to lay down a bunt--and couldn't, because he doesn't know how to bunt. I mean, to be fair, Loney's probably not gonna get asked to bunt many times in his career. But: still.

You're a fucking baseball player. It's all you do all day. You should know how to bunt.

And you're getting paid millions of dollars!

Gah.

What the hell?

I haven't been paying attention to the news the last couple of days, but now it looks like Iran's election was clearly rigged, and people are taking to the streets?! Sullivan has a gripping video.

President Cartwright and SUPERTRAIN

Watch my video:



Then watch SUPERTRAIN (well, the first few minutes at any rate):



I think I tried something like this before on this blog but the xtranormal site was wonky...let's see if we have better luck this time.

John Lennon, sonofabitch

Stumbled across this snippet of the John Lennon interviews, which must have been in like 1970 or so when he and Paul were at the height of their schoolyard taunting phase. It's pretty great.

Reconsidering Fisher's endorsement deal

Maybe the people at FRS Healthy Energy were prescient after all...

Lakers in five?

2-1

Entertaining game, and I have to say that I liked the Lakers' effort. I mean, if in order for Orlando to eek out a win they need home court, and the best shooting night in Finals history, and Kobe shooting 50% (!) at the line, then I think LA is in a good position for the series.

Derek Fisher, pro-basketball champion

Surprisingly, Derek Fisher has an endorsement deal:



Presumably the contract was signed before Fisher's abysmal, sub-40%-shooting playoffs performance.

NYT falls down again

This time on a Pentagon report that erroneously concluded that "1 in 7" prisoners released from Gitmo returned to the battlefield. The real number, once you factor out people who were not terrorists before their incarceration (but who became radicalized by the experience), is 1 in 20. Which is pretty striking, because it means that it is possible that we created more terrorists than we released, pretty well illustrating how it could be that the whole Gitmo project was counterproductive.* And yet, Cheney was able to quote this false statistic during the public debate between him and Obama on national security.

To the Times' credit, though, this story was written by their public editor.

* You can't necessarily conclude that anyone who was not a terrorist before Gitmo but who became one afterwards indeed became a terrorist because of their experience at Gitmo; it might have been the case that they would have become a terrorist even if they hadn't been incarcerated. You'd have to examine each case on its own. Still, though, I think there is enough circumstantial evidence in this to strongly suspect that their incarceration in Gitmo caused them to become terrorists--and this should have been the story.

Defending political correctness

A good post from Coates:

But watching conservatives mock liberals for being PC, is like watching the morbidly obese mock Weight Watchers for its system of points.

Read the whole thing. It's a good reminder that political correctness sometimes makes fools of people, sometimes goes too far, but in general, is far, far more beneficial than harmful. And I like his point that a failure to be political correct--or to know how to be politically correct--is really just a luxury that comes with being in the majority, where you are never forced to engage with or understand people who are different from you.

And then some claims--well, they're just straightforwardly ridiculous

You don't really need to watch the following clip; suffice it to say that former Congressman Tom Tancredo equates La Raza to the Ku Klux Klan:


Of course, this is ridiculous: the KKK was a murderous organization that systematically terrorized black people. It is an organization that committed many horrible, violent crimes. But La Raza has committed zero violent crimes. It has terrorized precisely no one.

And the thing is, even if we grant for the sake of argument that La Raza really is a racist organization, and that it advocates policies that really are racist, it still isn't remotely comparable to the Klan. Even if we grant Tancredo's crazy worldview, he is still wrong because he fails to distinguish between a peaceful law-abiding racist organization and a violent vigilante racist organization.

So that's an impressive trick: to be so wrong, that you're still wrong even when the other side grants all of your points. At this point I'm just kind of curious to see what new and ingenuitive ways of being wrong Tancredo will come up with next.

When political junky-ism reduces to a Jay Walking segment

I never much cared for Jay Leno, but I always had to grudgingly admire his "Jaywalking" bit, where he would take a camera out somewhere and quiz people on questions they ought to know (like, who is Joe Biden). Of course, if you ask enough people an easy question, eventually you'll find one poor sap who doesn't know the answer. And after enough filming you can edit together just the saps, and then--voila--you've made the general population of Los Angeles look far more uninformed than it actually is. It's a simple trick, but it makes for pretty good TV.

Something I've been starting to notice, though, is that this same mechanism will often be at work on the internets. What happens is, you end up regularly reading blogs that more or less reinforce your worldview. And these blogs take it upon themselves to hold the other side accountable for their words and actions--as they should--and so they call out offensive and ignorant quotes from the other side and scathingly tear them apart.

And all this is fine, as far as it goes. But what happens is that, after a while, you start getting a very skewed picture of what the other side is all about. The mess-ups, the poorly phrased statements, the idiots--that's what you get exposed to, just like a Jaywalking segment. And, you know, it's entertaining.

But over time this sort of thing just stifles any kind of meaningful exchange of ideas across the ideological divide. I mean, is it really intellectually honest or useful in any way for Andrew Sullivan--who has the most popular political blog in the universe--to call out a whackjob comment in some arbitrary right wing blog somewhere?

(Photo by Xurble)